Gonzalo Pita

Gonzalo L. Pita, PhD. Johns Hopkins University

Gonzalo is a research Scientist and Lecturer at the Civil Engineering Department of the Johns Hopkins University, and an independent consultant.

He designed and teaches a graduate course on Natural Disaster Risk Modeling and Management and an undergraduate course on Introduction to Risk Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. In addition he teaches Seminar of General Engineering also at JHU.

As a risk modeler for the Florida’s Public Hurricane Loss Model, Gonzalo has conducted research and developed vulnerability and risk simulations. Afterwards, he became a researcher at the Department of Civil Engineering and Systems Institute at JHU and worked on assessing hurricane hazard, building down-times, and data mining projects. He has also conducted research on model-order reduction of the equations of seismic motion for structures with energy dissipators. Gonzalo has also worked on assessing the risk of childhood obesity in the United States at the JHU’s School of Public Health.

As a Senior Consultant at The World Bank in Washington DC for almost four years, he has collaborated with international counterparts in natural risk projects and led several technical projects including Country Disaster risk profiles, vulnerability studies of storm shelters, long term impact of windstorm activity on poverty, the impact of climate change and built-environment changes on present and future risk, and conducted international training seminars. In this capacity he has also collaborated with and advised international students during their internships at the World Bank.

His current research is focused on multidisciplinary studies in international natural risk projects, modeling of natural hazards (hurricanes and downbursts), wind engineering, building vulnerability modeling, decision making, and fundamentals of risk frameworks. He has more than 40 journal and conference publications, wrote more than 20 internal technical reports and a book chapter.

He is the founder of CREAAnalytics a consulting firm specializing in complex risk and engineering projects.